preserving the past, protecting the future

Our Mission

When Wikipedia took the bold step of creating an on-line storehouse for the accumulated conglomerate of human knowledge they defined their mission as:

empowering and engaging people around the world to collect and develop educational content, and to disseminate it effectively and globally free of charge, in perpetuity.

Our mission, while focusing specifically on heritage material – objects, architecture and places – rather than educational content generally, is otherwise just the same. And like Wikipedia, the success of our enterprise depends entirely on the support of our user community. Your images, the memories of your city, your travels, your childhood and your history, will inform the Million Image Database. Through images obtained from volunteer photographers using our proprietary 3D imaging kits, digitized by us from paper archives, donated via social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, or received directly from individuals and institutions via email or snailmail, our goal is to create a permanent, open-access archive of humanity’s history as represented by the things we build – a Google Earth for heritage.

Visit frequently – the site will grow every single day. Like Wikipedia this is your site, your history, your heritage. Please contribute. We are at the beginning of an amazing journey and everyone’s history deserves to be remembered.

The documentation of cultural heritage in areas affected by conflict or natural disasters, including through the use of new digital technologies, is a critical step to preserve the memory of our past and mitigate the risk of possible damage or loss of precious cultural assets. Initiatives such as the Million Image Database project by the Institute for Digital Archaeology, which is based on the support of numerous volunteers on the ground, also testify to the importance attributed to their cultural heritage by local communities.

Francesco Bandarin, Assistant Director-General for Culture, UNESCO

By using digital techniques to map and preserve monuments and other aspects of shared human history, we are able to ensure that nobody can deny history or dictate that their narrative or ideology stands above the shared story of all humanity and our shared aspiration to live together in harmony.